Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

Douglas Noël Adams was an English author, humorist, and screenwriter, best known as the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy evolved into a "trilogy" of six books which sold more than 14 million copies in his lifetime. It was adapted into a 1981 television series, several stage plays, comics, a 1984 video game, and a 2005 feature film.

Quotes

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash form point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all decide where the hell they wanted to be.
There are two things in particular that it [the computer industry] failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet(...); the other was the fact that the century would end.
Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature. That's how it should be. Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
She is the least benightedly unintelligent organic lifeform it has ever been my distinct lack of pleasure not to have been able to avoid meeting.
Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.
Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk.
Anything that happens, happens. Anthing that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.
My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefor excused from saving Universes.
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end.
How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensation and my state of mind?
There is an art, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination.
It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.
Today must be a Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

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